Sector(s)

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Organizations Involved

The International Society for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) is a global organization dedicated to improving lung cancer research, education, and patient care. Although the IASLC boasts a membership of approximately 8,000 from more than 100 countries, it is a relatively small organization, with only 25 full-time staff and no dedicated IT group.

Because of this, it has been difficult for the IASLC to stay abreast of industry standards regarding website design and platform offerings. A leadership group of 5 IASLC employees.

IASLC partnered with Vardot to deliver their new Drupal website on Varbase.

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About the project

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Project Analysis

From the onset, Vardot dedicated an account management team that features all relevant departments to understand the requirements, goals, pains, needs, and challenges that the IASLC needed to address.

In short, IASLC's requirements were a robust CMS with enterprise-grade content publishing capabilities. The new CMS must feature a user-friendly backend in addition to flexibility for future growth, scaling, and critical integrations.

IALSC stressed on the importance of post-delivery support and maintenance.

Key Points

  • Value and Impact: The IASLC stressed the importance of presenting a digital experience around their value to the medical community. The need to highlight their work and impact was paramount.
  • SEO and Tech: The legacy IASLC website suffered from poor maintenance and support that lead to declining performance on search engines. Moreover, the non-technical and small staff behind content creation found the legacy Microsoft DNN CMS to be difficult and the process of content publishing cumbersome.
  • User Experience: The lack of a coherent structure in the website meant that the user experience was disjointed and frustrating for website visitors. An issue that both digital marketing and our UI/UX departments addressed from the onset.
  • Migration: IASLC needed all data (1,500+ nodes and digital assets) to be migrated to the new CMS and website securely.

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Solutions

The fact that we built the new IASLC Drupal website on Varbase meant that we can deliver the project in record time; as Varbase is already packed with 100+ features and modules essential to the modern enterprise-grade digital experience.

All the best practices and standards regarding security, accessibility, and user experience are already up to date due to the ongoing support and maintenance that Varbase goes through.

The following are the highlights of the project delivery:

Revamped UX Design

  • The new Drupal IASLC website design is responsive to all screen sizes and devices. Mobile-first atomic design.
  • All outdated UX features were upgraded to portray the value and impact of IASLC's work.
  • Static webpages are now engaging dynamic rich-content user experiences.
  • Website content structure completely revamped to boost the UX and eligibility for Google's best practice standards.

Content Publishing Made Easier for nonprofits

Seamless Content Publishing

  • Content creators have specific roles and permissions to make the workflow more seamless and easier to manage.
  • Robust media library that enables the user to search, find, and repurpose content easily. Saving time.
  • User-friendly rich content editor and backend features making it easier for non-technical users to maximize their benefit from Varbase's capabilities.
  • On-site SEO features and tools enabling IASLC to optimize the performance of their webpages and content across all search engines.
  • Auto-publishing across all of IASLC's microsites was enabled, highlighting the IASLC's content, resources, and all digital assets when necessary.
     

Accurate and Secure Migration of Data

Before proceeding with the automatic migration of all data (1,500+ node pages and digital assets), Vardot presented a clear migration plan and process to the IASLC.

The content migrated included:

  • Landing Pages
  • Resources
  • Media Entities
  • News
  • Podcasts

All the aforementioned content formats were carefully inspected, collected, and curated by our team prior to proceeding with migration to ensure 100% data integrity.

Future Growth

  • Ability to integrate an LMS in order to hold virtual sessions, meeting, and events.
  • IASLC now has the capability to upgrade to Drupal 9 when needed easily thanks to their migration to Drupal 8.
  • IASLC now enjoys content translation capabilities should they choose to engage a wider and global audience of users.
  • Multisite Functionality - IASLC can now build microsites for their events, meetings, and conferences when required. All created microsites are managed centrally by the same CMS, Varbase.

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Why Drupal was chosen

IASLC had very specific requirements (technical and non-technical), and in response we presented to them the ideal solution for their challenges; Varbase - the Drupal 8/9 Distribution and Enterprise CMS.

The priorities that Varbase enabled IASLC to address are:

  • The need to launch the new website quickly. Faster-to-market.
  • Seamless content publishing experience for a small content creation team.
  • Flexible integrations with tools and technologies critical to their digital strategy objectives.
  • Superior on-site SEO performance.
  • Easier creation of landing pages and customization of existing web pages for non-technical staff.
  • Updated and supported UX features.
  • The ability to create microsites managed by the same CMS in the future.
  • Growth and scalability capabilities as the website is meant to be a dynamic and growing community of medical professionals.
  • Enterprise-grade security and accessibility standards.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version: